The 6 Most Spectacularly Failed Attempts to Look Cool

No one likes a showoff. Not even fate, apparently -- because every once in a while it sees fit to prick someone's inflated ego balloon with its embarrassment needle, resulting in a spectacular backfire like ...

#6. Russian Wedding Roulette Lands on Red

Getty

Weddings are known for fun little activities such as the conga line, bouquet toss and Russian roulette. What, you've never played that last one at a wedding? Well, at a wedding in (where else?) Russia, a friend of the groom was giving a toast when he decided that the best way to really impress the other guests with his unsurpassed wedding-toast skills would be to whip out a handgun, point it at his own head and pull the trigger.

Russian weddings are known to be a favorite haunt of Darwin's ghost.

Now if you're at all familiar with guns, you might have noticed the first clue that this guy maybe isn't the sharpest tool in the shed: He's using a semiautomatic pistol to play Russian roulette -- a game that requires a revolver so that you can spin the cylinder like, you know, a roulette wheel. But he'd emptied the gun of bullets beforehand, so rather than redecorating the wedding cake with douchebrains, when he pulled the trigger it resulted in nothing more than an anticlimactic click. The whole thing was just a harmless little wedding prank, a quaint memory for him and his friends to laugh about in the years to come. Right?

The Backfire:

Unfortunately, the virus Dumbassviridae is highly contagious (particularly at parties), and this guy didn't want to be the only one riding the self-inflicted-gunshot-wound train that night. So he recocked the gun and looked around as if to ask who else had the balls to step up to the plate and act like a total jackass, and then a second guy grabbed the gun and repeated the action -- only this time the supposedly empty gun fired a live round into the man's skull.

It's basically Deer Hunter meets Jackass.

Fortunately for him, it was only a rubber bullet. Unfortunately for him, it wasn't exactly a NERF gun firing that rubber bullet, and the man had to be hospitalized due to his severe head wound. Meanwhile, the guy who brought a pistol to a freaking wedding was arrested and charged with hooliganism, since -- even in Russia -- being a complete douche isn't a crime yet.

#5. Cop/Aspiring Porn Star Gets Citation

Getty

It was just an ordinary day for Tennessee Highway Patrol trooper James Moss -- that is, until a hot-pink Honda Accord money-shot past his speed trap at 20 mph over the posted limit. Moss pulled the car over, and inside he found alcohol, a bottle of Vicodin and one innocent-looking young gal by the innocent-sounding name of Barbie Cummings.

Apparently being no stranger to traffic stop protocol, Barbie got straight to conveniently mentioning that she was a purveyor of the pornographic arts. Intrigued, Moss had her sit in the front seat of his patrol car while he used his (state-issued) laptop to pull up her website, the contents of which (lots of Pomeranians, probably) were apparently the digital equivalent of a "Get Out of Jail Free" card.

So he tossed the pills and booze into some nearby bushes and invited Cummings to join him for some backseat shenanigans in his patrol car. And if that sounds like routine corrupt cop stuff rather than showing off, you should know that Moss captured the entire incident on his cellphone, and afterward he had the bright idea to ask Cummings to post the photos on her blog so his friends couldn't call bullshit when he bragged about banging a porn star.

The Backfire:

Cummings obliged him by posting the photos and blogging about the incident in detail.

But unlike most employers, it appears that the Tennessee Highway Patrol isn't too keen on its employees using work hours to film self-starring porn. They put Moss on paid leave and launched an immediate investigation -- "investigation" in this case meaning "repeated awkward viewings of your co-worker's sex tape."

When the event hit the headlines, it didn't take long for other women to come forward to report inappropriate traffic stops by Moss, and he was indicted on six counts of official misconduct, two counts of official oppression, two counts of tampering with evidence and several counts of grossing out other highway patrolmen. He resigned just before the Tennessee Highway Patrol could fire him, and his going-away gift was four years of probation.

And how did Cummings come out in this whole deal, you ask? Moss still gave her the speeding ticket.

#4. Man Has Badass Competition With Gator, Loses

Getty

Wallace Weatherholt, or Captain Wally as he's known in the biz, was a tour boat guide in the Florida Everglades. His job was to take groups of tourists too cheap to spring for Disney World out for swamp tours and to not get more than, like, a couple per month eaten by alligators. But ol' Captain Wally apparently wasn't too clear on that last point, as he often tried to impress his customers by luring alligators to his airboat.

In the summer of 2012, Wally took a group of six people (including children) out to show them city slickers a thing or two about what they do for fun in the wetlands. Weatherholt lured an alligator to the boat by dangling a fish over the side.

weirdcrime.netYou know you really should rethink things when your plans are essentially the same as the van/candy thing child molesters do.

When the alligator asked permission to board -- one of the passengers reported that he "had his front feet in the boat" -- Weatherholt put his boot on the alligator's snout and shoved it back into the water to demonstrate just how much of a badass he was (and, just to be fair, that does sound pretty badass). Then he slapped the water with his hand, encouraging the gator to come back for a second round.

The Backfire:

Well, all we can say is that it's a good thing Wally didn't decide to truly degrade the gator by taunting it with his "Lil Captain." Because the tourists suddenly found themselves smack in the middle of a SyFy original movie when the swamp monster, seemingly having just then realized that it was a goddamn swamp monster, rose up again and clamped down on the Wallster's hand, leaving nothing behind but a stump and "bone and skin hanging down." On second thought, the effects were probably far too realistic for our SyFy movie comparison.

"Shit, I just bought that watch."

Officials later managed to track the alligator down, presumably picking it out of the thousands-strong lineup based on which one rushed the boat when it saw a fresh delivery of scrumptious humans headed its way. They recovered Weatherholt's partially digested hand from its belly -- a process that probably didn't end too comfortably for the gator -- and then rushed it to the hospital, where doctors tried unsuccessfully to reattach it.

And now in addition to one hand, Captain Wally looks to be out 500 bucks -- apparently it's a second-degree misdemeanor to feed parts of yourself to an alligator.